HYDERABAD: The long-dead Indian cheetah may be up and running wild again — if efforts by Indian scientists to genetically engineer its resurrection prove to be successful.

The brainchild of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), research facilities are now being set up in the 240-acre Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad, the high-tech capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, to clone the cheetah which disappeared in India some 50 years ago.

At the moment, the CCMB, in collaboration with the park, is conducting studies on the basic reproductive biology of big cats, including lions, tigers and leopards. It will extend its research in order to try and revive the cheetah at its Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES), to be constructed in the park.

“Isn’t the cheetah a magnificent animal?” muses Lalji Singh, Indian’s best known genetic scientist, who heads this project. “It’s a tremendous loss to India that it has become extinct.”

Much of the blame for the cheetah’s disappearance from India lies with another extinct species — the luxury-loving Indian maharajahs and sultans. Hunting with cheetahs became an established feature of India’s courtly life as far back as 800 years ago. They were also prized as pets.

Even after the end of the Moghul Sultanate, the last of India’s great princely rulers, the tradition continued right until the 1950s — courtesy of maharajahs big and small.

The great Moghul emperor Akbar alone was said to have collected 9,000 cheetahs during his lifetime, owning 1,000 of them at one point.

But the practice of domesticating cheetahs for royal sport deprived these animals of their natural habitat. Away from the jungles, breeding was difficult in palaces. And the capture of females not only made the survival of cubs in the wild impossible but also affected breeding.

Not only were they domesticated, in the 20th century India’s British rulers enthusiastically joined in royal hunting parties in which cheetahs were relentlessly and mercilessly shot down.

The destruction of semi-desert grassland and scrubs — the cheetah’s natural habitat — by growing population and agriculture use also contributed to its demise.

Finally, the Indian cheetah was declared extinct in November 1952.

But there is no finality about Singh’s plans — he does not like to contemplate a future without cheetahs.

He and his colleagues at Hyderabad have set themselves an ambitious task: they want to conduct ‘genetic characterization’ of the cheetah, chalk out strategies for breeding, establish sperm and egg banks, and set up facilities for artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation so that, eventually, they can clone the animals.

“Even if a single cheetah had been found or had the cell lines been made from one, it would have been possible to resurrect the species,” says Singh.

“Unfortunately, we have lost the animal forever. There are a few cheetahs in Iran — we are not sure of the numbers. Since the territory of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India was common ground for cheetahs, we believe that the cheetah in Iran will be the same as Indian cheetah.”

So little is known about the genetic differences between the subspecies of the cheetah, that Singh and his group have started collecting skin and bone tissues of the Indian cheetah — from samples found in an Indian museum — and of the African variety from the remains of one that died in Delhi Zoo a few years ago.

“This may tell us the extent of similarity and differences,” says Singh.

Scientists have also proposed to the Central Zoological Authority of India (CZAI) that it should try and obtain a couple of cheetahs from Iran so that they can test if they can clone an Indian cheetah using a leopard as a surrogate mother.

A similar technique was used in the first successful cloning of a wild endangered animal — conducted at Trans Ova Genetics in Sious Centre, Iowa, in the United States in November 2000.

American scientists fused the skin cells of a male Gaur — a wild ox native to India and some other Asian countries — with the eggs of a cow. The baby Gaur, named Noah, died two days after birth.

The Indian experiment is billed as the second of its kind. Following a four-month countrywide search, the team found some skin and skeletal samples of the Indian cheetah in a museum in the former princely city of Mysore in southern India. They are now trying to isolate the DNA from the samples.

“We are determined to keep on trying,” says Singh, and hints at a wider aim.

“The destruction of forest areas causes fragmentation of habitats of wild animals and threatens the survival of lions, tigers and leopards, especially because these animals require huge areas for sustaining to a level of certain minimum number.”

India already faces severe problems of poaching and habitat loss, which threaten its remaining big cats. Singh wants to address the problem through what he calls “bio-technological intervention” — by setting up gene banks of semen, eggs and embryos of endangered species.

When such facilities are established, Indian zoological parks can act as laboratories for breeding endangered species.

Once bred, these rare animals are to be nurtured in a futuristic twilight zone — with minimum human intervention, so as not to influence their behaviour. The animals can then be released into their natural habitat — if these still exist, that is — when their numbers reach below the critical level.

For now though, Singh’s Brave New World awaits news from the Iranians.

“I have so far not succeeded in getting a positive response in procuring a live cheetah or skin biopsy to go ahead with the cloning programme. Procuring a cheetah is my biggest challenge,” he says.

Once he has the cheetah, Singh reckons, it will take no more than two to three years’ work to produce a clone — “provided we do not run into unexpected problems which vary from species to species”.

He and his team believe it’s worth the wait: “Our attempts are to find a bright future for threatened beings.”—Dawn/Gemini News Service.